Sunday, May 11, 2008

Merbunity Is Live

Lets face it. Merb, for all it's goodies lacks good documentation at the moment. It' lacks a nice easy path to help beginners get into it.

I've been working on a site for a while to address this, and even though it's not finished, Merb's need for documentation is just too great.

Merbunity is a Merb commUnity site for all things Merb. Currently active are News, Tutorials, and Screencasts.

This is really a community site. It relies on the community writing the tutorials, screencasts, making the news announcements. There is other stuff on the cards, but for now I thought I'd get this out.

To try and keep the site of a high standard, it implements a peer review system. When you sign up, you can write all the tutorials and screencasts you like. When you decide that they're good enough, you can publish them, But... at that point they're not really published. They're 'Pending'. They need someone who is a "Publisher" to authorize them.

So the basic flow is, you write a tutorial or screencast, publish it, it becomes pending. At that point, you can have discussions with publishers about any tweaks that may be necessary. Once they're happy with it, they publish it for real, and it's live on the site. Don't worry though. You don't have to worry about that for ever... That would suck. Once you've published 3 "things" you become a publisher yourself, and you can publish others work, as well as your own.

When your a publisher you can also put up news on the site.

Tutorials and screencasts can be about anything you like, provided they are relevant to the Merb community. They could be about Merb, ORMS's upcoming tech, specs, whatever.

It really is up to us to make Merb great, and I think this will be a good place we can focus on.

Work is ongoing on the site to make it better all the time. Kudo's to Luke Sutton for a great site design. If there's any glitches in it, I'm sure it's my fault since I just *had* to play with it ;)